I'd like to have an idea what you guys think of Visual Studio 2012 and whether you ended up choosing it for your development needs (naturally if you don't use the Visual Studio line, don't bother with this thread).
It's been 3 months and the changes to VS interface really had an impact on me. So much that despite my MSDN account giving me free access to the Ultimate edition, I refused to us it. I'm still using -- and probably will be for a long while -- Visual Studio 2010.
- C++ introduced C++ amp. This is good, but not for me. Access to CPU accelerators isn't in my line of work.
- Better compliance to C++11. But not too much, really. Instead they decided to focus on scary iterators. I'd rather see Microsoft concentrate on standards compliance than yet another compiler extension. *bored*
- Vector loops and Auto-Parallelization. Unless there's some problems with this I'm not aware of, this is indeed a great addition to the compiler optimization routines. (BTW, have there been any benchmarks on this?)
- The changes to .Net 4.5 were frankly disappointing. Nothing really interesting for me there.
- C# had also got a lukewarm upgrade. The async and await keywords are the best (and only) of the bunch. But frankly don't get me to move to VS2012 when I don't mind the code they save me from typing in comparison to having to deal with VS2012 interface.
- I suppose an interesting feature is the (finally!) out of the box support for 0-configuration database through SQL Server Express LocalDB.
When Looking at a new VS edition I always focus on (other than language enhancements):
- improvement to debugging features
- improvements to static analysis
Those are my main key areas. VS2012 does offer a bit to both. But that interface really got in the way. I tested it in April and May, IIRC. For a whole month, more or less. And frankly I found it hard on my eyes. The monochrome style has also been a problem to me on Microsoft Blender for instance. I get tired quickly when using this type of interface.
But what about any of you? Has then been a release you jumped into without any second thoughts? Or, just like me you couldn't stand the look of it?